Reach Media Blog!
Tips for SEO Success: Becoming king of Google!
By Gerard Donnelly
In this article I am going to discuss some of the top factors required inorder to make you a Google God and aim for the top of the search engine rankings.
Why Does SEO matter?
99.99% of people who use the internet will more than likely be using a search engine such as Google to look for what they want. Web users have become a lot smarter in recent times. Even if a potenial customer knows your direct web address they will often do a search first in order to look for a cheaper supplier or maybe even an alternative item before (if your lucky) visiting your site and making a purchase. Gone are the days of the corner shops and local suppliers. The internet has made the world a smaller place and people are becoming more and more comfortable with making purchases over the internet and using it in general.
If your currently thinking "I dont own a website that sells items, so it doesn't really matter to me", STOP! Local telephone directories are not used anymore either. Take for example me. I supply web and graphic design services in Belfast, Northern Ireland. So lets look at how people find for instance a web designer in Belfast. In the old days people would have picked up their local yellow pages and flicked to the page listing "web design companies Belfast". Nowadays though people go to a search engine such as Google (Over 70% of web searches on the internet are done using google) and type a phrase such as "Web Design Belfast". They will then click on the first few results and make a desion on who to use. People will rarely browse past page 2. What about all the other great web design companies on pages 3,4,5 etc...? Well you have just lost out. The company that got the job might not neccessarily be better than you, maybe even worse. But because they rank highly in Google they are succeeding!
So hopefully you are now getting an idea of why it is so important to have a site that is optimised to rank highly in google. I have detailed some techniques below that will help you on your way to ranking better. If you put these techniques into practice you should see results. Good Luck!!!
1. Keywords
You need to select only 1 or 2 keywords or phrases that you want to rank highly in. Also, you should try and localise these. For example it would be better to focus on "web design Belfast" rather than "web design". Remember to focus on your customers and what you think they type in order to find your site. Dont try and be a jack of all trades(keywords), better to be a master of one. Your Keyword or phrase should then be used as much as possible without effecting the flow or quality of content. Remeber people still have to read it. Try and use your keywords in Page titles, headers and urls for example: (www.reachmediani.co.uk/web_design_belfast.html).
2.Metadata
This is the hidden code. It lives in the head section of your webpage and is not seen by the visitors. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo use this data to help build up a picture of your site.
Here is an example of some meta data your site should have:
There is usually a lot more meta data than above but they are the most important. The Meta Description and the Meta Keywords. The Meta Description is read by Google and is used like a small sentence to describe the page. Google will often diplay the meta description in its results. In my example I said:
"Web Design Belfast, specialist web design and seo optimisation, we make beautiful web sites. Reach Media web design are based on the Malone Road Belfast Northern Ireland."
You can see how I tried to make this description keyword heavy but tried to keep the content readable. I have mentioned "web design" and "Belfast" as much as possible. Dont just repeat the Keywords though as Google picks up on this and will penalise you!
For my Meta Keywords I have said:
"web design belfast, website design,web design, motion graphics, Belfast, SEO, logo design, bar visuals, graphic design, flyer design, branding, northern ireland, web hosting"
Keywords used to be a lot more important a few years ago but I dont really think Google pays much attention to them anymore, but it is better to have them included anyway. Some of the other search engines like Yahoo, Lycos and Aol may still use them.
3. Submit to Search Engines
If your site is new it may take weeks or months before the search engines start to pick up on it. For this reason it is a good idea to manually submit your site. I have included below a list of direct links to the specific submit pages for the most populat search engines:
Yahoo: http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ukie/express/splash.html
Google: http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/
Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
AltaVista: http://www.altavista.com/addurl/default
4. Be Social
Nowadays social networking is everywhere and for that reason it cannot be ignored. Try and join as many forums, communitees and social sites as possible. For instance being a web designer I would regularly visit a lot of web design forums and help to answer questions from other visitors. I also use twitter, facebook and as you know as your reading it, I have also started a blog. By putting yourself out there people will take notice. Hopefully some of the people reading this article will like it and Tweet, Facebook or Digg It etc.. By doing that others will see it and so on and so forth. The more it goes about, the more people visit my site, the more important google ranks it and hey presto!!! Im moving up the listings.
5. Back Linking
Let me make this clear now. This list of techniques is not in order of importance. Back Listing is a major contributor to search engine rankings. The more links you have going to your website the more important Google etc.. think it is. The quality of links is also important. For me links coming from other sites discussing web design is a lot better than a link coming from a site talking about football. The rank of the page that your link is placed on is also a factor. Google ranks websites between 0 -10. If your site is unbelievably popular it will have a high rank (Amazon has a rank of 8). If Google has given a page a rank of 5 and another site has a Google rank of 2, it is obviously better to have a link from the higher ranking site.
To sum up back linking you need to try and get as many other websites as possible to link to yours. You can use link exchange services or ask other website owners to exchange links but for good quality high ranking links you will have to either pay or provide good content that other people will want to show on their site. This leads nicely onto my next technique...
6. Content
Content is King. If your site has good quality content that people enjoy or find interesting and informative your site will inevitably move up the ranks. The better the content the more people will visit and revisit your site. There is also more likelyhood that they will reccomend it to friends or colluges and spread the word about it on their social networks. Take the time to create good content. People often get hung up on how good the site looks and forget about the quality of the content in it. It is often quite time consuming (take this article as an example) but in the long run it will pay you back many times over.
7.Proper Image names and Alt Tags
A major mistake that many website designers and modarators make is naming their images. Calling an image "image1.jpg", "football_1.jpg" is pointless as far as SEO is concerned. Google and other search engines read and store your image names and Alt Tags. It is much better to call an image "web_design_belfast.jpg" for example than "logo.jpg" and the same goes for Alt Tags. If you dont know what an Alt Tag is, it is the text that a browser displays if the image cant load, or on mouse over, or what certain software will read out for people with bad eyesite or who are blind.
I hope you found the tips helpful and informative. There is a lot lot more that I could list but I thought I would just give you a taste to see what you thought. If there is good feedback I will write a part 2. Thanks for reading and if you did like the article please use the links provided to tweet it etc..
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